To receive verbal updates from each thematic group on what its plans are likely to be going forward and what the governance and membership may be.
Minutes:
Members received verbal updates from the thematic groups as follows:-
Empowering Communities
Gill O’Neill, Deputy Director of Public Health reported as follows:-
The three priorities for this thematic group contained in the Strategy were:
• Ensure that partners, providers, practitioners and the systems they work in promote and encompass a 'more than medicine' approach.
• Provide people and communities with access to networks and activities which will support good health and resilience.
• Support people to gain knowledge, skills and confidence they need to be active partners in managing and understanding their own health and health care.
There had been significant organisational and system change since the priorities were agreed and there had still been a lot of progress on this work since the strategy was written and now there were:
• NCT and its Strategic Board
• Thriving Together and the 13 thematic networks
o Tackling inequalities task force (operational)
• VCSE Liaison Group
• Inequalities Plan and the HWBB Steering Group
• ICS level -scoping the social prescribing offer
• Health Watch board
It had been discussed if this was about strategically creating a collaborative approach to asset based community development and doing that through our wider workforce inclusive of social prescribers, health trainers, link workers, locality coordinators etc.
It was proposed that the first steps would be:
• Chairs of the groups listed above to talk to their groups about coming together in a system workshop to scope out a gap analysis of what and how we were already working towards the priorities in the strategy and where we might wish to focus our collective attention.
• Workshop December/January to discuss and agree how to work collaboratively across existing groups and if one group could be morphed to become the Empowering People and Communities Thematic Board or if individual groups were retained but to agree to come together a few times a year to ensure cohesive practice and delivery.
• To report back to Health & Wellbeing Board in January/February pending agreement of the workshop date.
Best Start in Life
Graham Reiter, Service Director - Children's Social Care and Interim DCS, provided the following update:-
• Best quality education
• Children feeling safe and supported in all areas of life
• Support children, young people and their families to make positive lifestyle and social choices.
The Department was already looking at the range of governance arrangements in place regarding partnership work around safeguarding children and young people strategic plan, healthy families. These could be streamlined to sit under this thematic area. There were a number of activities ongoing including:-
• Wholesale review of education provision
• Continue to invest in the capital programmes to create an environment which promoted learning.
• Work with schools via school improvements to target children with free school meals who need additional support to reach their potential.
• Maximise the use of the pupil premium.
• Ensure that children and young people get the right support at the right time. First point of contact services had been looked at to try and look at and streamline these services. Try to prevent any escalation into statutory work and avoid the need for intervention.
• Family Hubs were a crucial development bringing partners together. This would include 0-19 work.
• Social work operation and the continual improvement in this area.
• Integration of children and adults Safeguarding Partnership work was being progressed.
• There was a key focus around special education needs and disabilities. There had been significant improvements in this area but remained areas for improvement.
• Emotional resilience and wellbeing of children and young people.
• Northumberland Education and Emotional Wellbeing Support Team created as part of a very innovative piece of work working alongside social work teams identifying the emotional and wellbeing support needs for vulnerable children and young people.
Whole System Approach
Alistair Blair and Rachel Mitcheson, NENC ICB, updated Members as follows:-
• This was a continuation of ongoing work. Focus on making every contact count across the health sector
• and looking with an inequalities lens identifying people from deprived communities
• looking at specific targeted interventions.
• mental health was very important within this and issues such as the cost of living would cause issues across this sector.
• The Integrated Care Board (ICB) was a very new organisation and would be looking at how to use the current System Transformation Board (STB) differently to enable more decisions to be made and link in with the statutory requirements of the ICB with regard to partnerships. A paper on governance arrangements could be submitted to a meeting of the Health & Wellbeing Board for information.
In answer to a query the following comments were made:-
• How do we demonstrate the outcomes of Making Every Contact Count? - It was possible that as a result of a single contact, a person may end up with multiple contact points. So it could, in fact, be a springboard to accessing multiple other services and it was important to ensure that there was a measurable impact on the quality of a person’s life. It may be that this was harder to measure and it may be better to measure the overarching reduction in inequalities rather than reducing the number of contacts.
• There were different ways to measure and it was difficult to quantify what had been avoided. Indicators used by the Health & Wellbeing Board may need to be refreshed. The use of case studies was vital along with service user feedback. Joint performance score cards could be developed across individual services.
Wider Determinants
Gill O’Neill reported that it was hoped that there would be a more detailed update to the December meeting.
The following points were noted:-
• The priority focus was around warm homes, jobs and transport.
• The issue was similar to that for Empowering Communities regarding whether there should be one group or a number to aid a collective understanding.
RESOLVED that the updates from the thematic groups be received.